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12.13.2010

Again, folks. Hyperfocus. No blogging cause I'm playing WoW (and also working/going to school) I hit 85. I've maxed herbalism and nearly maxed alchemy. I've been making about 2k a day. I have pictures all over the place; I've been taking a ton of screenshots, but currently I've been messing with video and trying to get it to actually look good and not at all artifact-y and gross. My resolution is 1440x900, better than any HDTV, so why can I only film at 240p? Furthermore, I'm typing this at a campus computer and blogging-by-email, so I have none of the pwetty pictures.

What have I to say for myself? Today I'm going to talk about leveling.

Leveling in Vanilla was brutal, and by brutal I mean horrendously dull. Yes, you could quest, but they gave little XP. Yes, you could grind, but it meant waiting for spawns, and the XP/hour was better than questing, but still somewhat abysmal. There was no dungeon finder; there was no cross-realm stuff; there was no leveling by gathering or pvp; it was hard to get a group together for a dungeon, and even then the quests weren't that great. PvE--grinding or questing, was the only way. I specifically recall the dreaded early-fifties. I've had probably six characters that hit level 50-54 or so and could not level. Winterspring, Silithus, and Eastern Plaguelands were too high to do without dying every five minutes. Felwood was a bit low and irritating to get around. Feralas had only a few quests that were that level, and Burning Steppes had few quests--just grinding for the Thorium Brotherhood. Literally, the only way I levelled to 60 was with a group that ground out mobs and ran Strat and the blackrock mountain dungeons (UBRS was too high until we hit 56 or 57, and by that time we could actually quest). BRD took hours to do, even after we knew the layout, which was a task in and of itself. To give you an example of BRD, here's a picture of its bosses:

Admittedly, one fight is seven mobs, the arena is multiple mobs, Coren Direbrew is a world event--but you get the point. Don't even bother with the map; it's incomprehensible.

Bringing it back to my initial point: Leveling in Vanilla sucked, and it only got worse the higher you were. Recall that these are the days before epic mounts, and normal mounts were level 40 and required 80g after reputation discounts. It took a shrewd player to scrape together 80g by level 40, and an insane one to get the actual 1000g for an epic mount. Those were more prestigious than epics, in the early patches. So imagine walking through the Barrens, north to south. That's minutes, which seems short, until you realize how many unproductive minutes it truly is.

Enter the Burning Crusade. Quest XP is significantly improved, but grinding is still the fastest way, and quests are far more engaging. Mounts are easier to get, and flying mounts trivialize certain quests (yes, you were already max level when you got your flyer, but there were still phat lewtz). Tobold mentions this in his MMORPG blog, but if you haven't read it (you should, though) he makes a good point noticed by many of my guildies: at the start of Burning Crusade, there were a TON of dungeons. There were 4 in Auchindoun, 3 in Hellfire, 3 in Netherstorm, and 3 in Zangarmarsh--those were the major dungeon complexes, not counting raids. That's 13 dungeons, and gave the opportunity for 13 more heroics. At level 70, there were about 19 dungeons that were level 70, counting normals and heroics. There was more immediately available top-end content, which Blizzard did excellently. There was a significant problem though. Getting to 70 was not a pain because of a dearth of quests, it was a pain because of the clearly defined leveling path. Hellfire => Terrokar => Nagrand => Blade's Edge => Netherstorm/Shadowmoon Valley. Though Blizzard was brilliant at giving extensive endgame content in Burning Crusade, they went overboard. It should be a funnel: more spreading out at lower levels, less at high levels. At the start of Burning Crusade, levelling was impossible because of hundreds of campers, sitting in Hellfire, trying to quest or grind their way up. However, quests were BETTER. They were more engaging, more lore-related. Factions weren't as arbitrary as Timbermaw or Wintersaber trainers--there were whole leadup quests to access Ogri'la, and you knew why the Mag'har were there and what they were all about.

Wrath comes out. Blizzard figures that you need two low-level zones so people can spread out during the beginning-expansion rush. At the higher zones, they add in phasing. Quests are, again, better. More continuous. Quest hubs are better designed, with a bit of linearity but also the ability to say "Fuck this place" and go somewhere else. There's also more exciting things you can do--I direct you to leveling from 1-10 as a BC race as compared to a Death Knight (which is one of the best-told stories in WoW.) Phasing is great, because there's less interference with other people, and the idea of the hero actually changing the world--that's great. The suspension of disbelief and thus the immersion in WoW was far superior to anything Blizzard had created. You truly wanted to kill the Lich King, which was too bad because the endgame in Wrath was inferior to Burning Crusade. NOTE: I'LL DO A WRATH RETROSPECTIVE AT SOME POINT. I HAVE SOME ISSUES WITH PEOPLE'S CONCEPTION OF IT.

Now, welcome to Cataclysm. Levelling is vastly improved from 1-60, and of course there's 80-85. Burning Crusade leveling is now the weakest link by a significant margin, so I hope that gets smoothed out. Something I noticed at the very beginning of the levelling process was the linearity and the use of phasing. Phasing somewhat alleviated the issues of "too many players in the same spot", as did the linearity. I've seen complaints with the directness of "Go to this hub, clear it out, go to the next hub" but as a lore nerd, I loved it, and it made it easier to sit down for longer play sessions, which is exactly what Blizzard wants. Vashj'ir is split into 3 subzones, and I did 140 quests start-to-finish. I was led to follow an epic storyline of Naga and god-beings and the corruption of Old Gods. The Kvaldir (the sea-vrykul) were brought back for a few cameos, which I enjoyed because the Kvaldir in WotLK seemed a bit half baked (Sea Vrykul! There's mist! It's evil! ...That's about it!). They're only 2/3rds baked now, but it gives me hope that we will see more of them. More importantly, the zone is fantastically well done, because of the introduction into it. You take a boat from your capital city--and it sinks! You can't find the boat at first, you're on the sea floor, you're running out of breath (well, I'm an undead, so I wasn't), and there it is. Your first quest gives you a small bonus to swim speed, to bring it up to normal running speed, and off you go. Soon, however, you're kidnapped and taken to other places, and eventually you have to find a mount. First, you tame a turtle, and it's even slower than you are. Then, you get to tame an Abyssal Seahorse, and that shit is AWESOME! Not only is the huge speed boost great, the actual seahorse model is brilliant, with little fringes and fluttering wings. Overall, the questing in Cataclysm is the best it has ever been. The starting small, the spreading out--it's apparent everywhere. Vashj'ir might be the most linear, but Deepholm gives you a wider range to play from the get-go, and instead of one overarching storyline, Uldum had two (Uldum, incidentally, was my favorite zone to quest in, though Vashj'ir is the most stunning visually). Twilight Highlands gives you a couple things to worry about, and spreads you out pretty nicely from the start; giving you a bit more questing options, and introducing the main villain (Cho'gal) really nicely due to the cutscenes. Not only is Cho'gal's model cool, the voice acting is good. Just before I heard him speak, I thought "he has two heads, a dozen eyes, and is batshit insane. This better be good."--it was.

Blizzard has cut XP throughout their history. I remember 1-60 was slashed by 25% or something in BC, and BC was slashed again, and recently 70-80 was cut by 20%--but they don't have to do that in Cataclysm, because the storyline is linearly set up, there's no mid-fifties grind, and it's already incredibly fast! Realm first for my server was about 15 hours, by a guy who got realm first 80. I was fourth in my guild to hit 85, and that was after 4 days of playing for a few hours a day. 84-85 was about 8 hours of slow, methodical progression; I wasn't racing. I'm sure it could be done in 6--compared to 69-70 which probably took me 20 hours or so.

12.07.2010

Warning: This post is about 1% game content. I mention Azeroth flying, and two zone names. That is the depth of "the cata experience" you will get from this post. Which isn't to say it doesn't have merit--this post isn't about playing cata as a character, this about literally you, a human being existing in the physical universe, manipulating your mouse and keyboard to progress your character in Cataclysm. In other words, this about the first 17 hours of cata, from the man behind the undead warrior Hyperiom. It's been a few weeks, but let me tell you why it has been--and let me connect the explanation to KATAKLIHZUM. The reason I'm terrible at blogging is the reason I'm excellent at leveling. No, it's not "I just lurve WoW so much I can't take my eyes off of it to blog about it"--I have ADD. Everyone knows what that is, or thinks they know what that is, but though it's "Attention Deficit Disorder" (technically, ADD is actually ADHD without a hyperactive component) it doesn't necessarily mean that I lose focus all the time. Don't get me wrong, that's part of it, but remember that it's a focus disorder. Something is wrong with my focus, so not only do I lose focus, but many studies show that ADD has a hyperfocus component. Just as I can get so bored with a task that I procrastinate endlessly (blogging) I can also sit down and watch an entire season of the Sopranos in one sitting. That's 12 hours. To further connect this, I will say that I had the cataclysm digital download, and after various failed login attempts, I ended up getting Azeroth flying and whisked my way over to Hyjal at about 12:30. I wanted to go to Vash'jir because it has more quests, but everyone ELSE wanted to do it for that reason, so I thought Hyjal would be less populated. In the end, I think I made the correct decision, even though it was totally accidental. So, to recap, 12:30am I'm logged in. 5:30am I'm logged out at level 81, maybe 30% to 82, and just going to sleep. 10:30am I wake up, can't get back to sleep, start playing. 5:00pm I log out, nearly 83, thinking nothing more than "Damn, that's scary." It's not scary that WoW is an addicting game, and personally I don't really have much of an addictive personality. You might say "but Hype, you just played wow for 12 of your past 12 waking hours!" to which I say "Yes, but I had nothing better to do besides watch TV and sleep, and I'm not sitting here blogging thinking "oh man oh man I gotta get back to playing oh man oh man." It's not addiction, it's a rather unattractive level of hyperfocus. I fully maintain the capability to play WoW, or do anything, until I say it's time to stop. My body doesn't go "Man, you should stop." I wasn't tired at 5:30 in the morning, and only now am I really feeling tired.

There is a dangerous element, to that, though. I made sure to sleep, and I knocked out one complete REM cycle. Other people in my guild didn't do that. I logged in and they were still playing. I was ahead of them when I logged out (I'm pretty good at questing, especially awesome cata quests) and they caught up and surpassed me, cause they didn't sleep. MY nerves were dulled enough that, at about 11:30am, I poured some boiling water on my hand while making tea, and I didn't notice for far too long. I'd guess the time it takes to {Pour boiling water on oneself; register the pain from that; stop boiling water on oneself} is probably a quarter of a second. Me, I stared at the boiling water on my hand for far too long. I'd say it took just under a second, maybe 8/10ths to do what should take 3/10ths. Worst of all, I shook my hand off and then kept pouring. That should've been an early warning sign that my brain is turning to mush.

"Hype," you might inquire, "didn't you just say you're not addicted? That you're fully capable of handling this?" No, fuck no. I'm not addicted, but any period of time where 12 of the last 17 hours have been leveling in WoW is bad for you, ESPECIALLY when you have as nasty a cold as I have. Did I mention that? Yeah, it was a doozy. I'm still thinking about going to the doctor, but it seems to be improving.

Now, I'm considering logging back in once I take a longer cooldown, and taking a shower has helped my state of mind. I want to hit 83 tonight, and I think I can in 3 hours or so. I want to finish Vash'jir.

So, how is Cata? Next post, kids, next post. I'll be more up-to-date now that I have fresh material. I might even have videos O_O

11.24.2010

I haven't been posting much because I feel like everything's been covered. I got a full set of tanking gear (after many runs with kingslayers and the like to faceroll instances) and I sincerely lack the mental effort to get a full fury set. Seriously, I did the math, and I figure I did >60 heroics in a week. That's what, 8 heroics a day? Actually, no, it's more like 2 heroics some days, and 15 other days. I think I played for 20 hours in one week. I think I'm going to die.

I thought to myself "damn, I'm already burned out. You did too much, Hype. You did too much."

Then the motherfucking Shattering happens.Servers are down, I can't do my dailies, and I think "man my blog is a piece of shit cause I don't ever update."

Then I realize "wait. Cataclysm is about to happen. I'm as cutting-edge as any non-beta participant. It's the wild wild west and I'll be Wyatt Earp."So I got FRAPS and I'm gonna start making warrior tanking videos. Also, I'm leveling up a troll rogue in Kalimdor & a BE priest in the Eastern Kingdoms (they're similar level, but one has a ton of heirloom gear so he'll level up faster) and I'm thinking of starting a Dwarf Shaman on sen'jin so I can go ahead and autojoin Premonition cause of my 1337 skillz. Just kidding. My shaman skills are shitty. I've tried to roll a ton but I just never did it. I'm pretty terrible at leveling, so once I finally got a level 80, I've stuck with him. I think it's time to expand my boundaries though--get another level 80 tank and then some healers, just so I can be more well-rounded. Also, I can start making videos about leveling as various classes, and changing up my UI. My ui is an ever-changing beast that used to be super customized, but isn't anymore cause I got some pre-pack (LUI, i think it's called) that's really good but has some seriously annoying things in it. Don't worry about it. LUI is good, you should get it if you're new to custom UIs, but if you're an old hat at it (back when bar mods meant manually scripting where every button was and what it did) then it might be frustrating.Enough about mods, though, let me tell you about my experience logging in, for the first time:

First, I made a dwarf shaman on Sen'Jin and have not even touched it.Logged on hyperiom.

I was in Dalaran, and as I'm sure we all know by now, there's no more portals in Dalaran. Boo-hoo. I know a trick, right? Go to Tanaris and fly to Org from there!So I go to Tanaris, pull out my Venomhide Hatchling, do the daily, and look around.I quickly realize that something's off. Anachronos is gone, and the three bronze drakes (Oculus, Tick, and... Chronalis?) are flying overhead, no longer hostile. Way off in the distance, I see the shadow of some ornate towers.

Interesting.

Eventually, I realize that the Shattering has indeed Shattered, and we're in a whole new ballgame. There's new models, new skins, different mobs of different level. I go do my daily and take a gander at Uldum (I get teleported out, obviously). Shit's looking good.

There's a whole long story that I'll eventually tell in picture form (took a TON of screenshots), but pretty much I couldn't fly back home cause I'm hated with Gadgetzan and their guards are level 85 now, and so I walked, rode, and swam to the Crossroads. It was tricky in 1k needles cause it's flooded (actually it was surprisingly sad, revisiting there, seeing freewind post destroyed by Grimtotems and the shimmering flats turned into an incredibly deep lake.) The barrens wasn't bad until I had to cross the giant molten rent in the earth, which apparently has only one way of crossing it--the coastline itself. Once in the north barrens, I wended my way towards Crossroads (not much different, there) and flew to Orgrimmar.Past the new marshes of durotar.Through the new gate.Onto the new wind rider platform.Which is atop the new plateau.Above the utterly changed city of Orgrimmar.

SHIT'S OFF THE CHAIN. Looks fantastic. Just fantastic. Currently I'm trying to break through literally years of muscle memory. I knew orgrimmar like the back of my hand. I could draw a map of it far easier than I could one of my hometown (which is much vaster but also vastly boring).

Anyways, I did the new cooking and fishing dailies, and I'm really excited for Cataclysm.SERIOUSLY.EXCITED.

I was gonna write more, but instead I'll tell you two things:

1) Gallery of Tanaris to Orgrimmar, I'll make one with captions and shit. Might just be a photobucket that I'll link to, cause it's many dozens of pictures.2) Got some screen capture software.==>2a)Was working with FRAPS (good quality) but though I could bear the watermark, the 30-second videos were a pain, and I'm not in the mood to pay $50 for the non-free version of a program, just to enhance a small-time blog with no readers, which is about a video game that has an expansion that I need to spend $50 on anyways. It's psychological, I must say. I've poured hundreds in monthly fees into wow, but $50 seems huge, and I'd never pay $100 for two programs! Even though I've paid $150 in programs already!==2b) Rant aside, I got some software with some kinda-shitty quality. We'll see. I was planning on recording videos for aoe tanking and stuff, so I queued up for randoms with the camera running, and did Pit of Saron. Problem is, it's SUPER FUCKING BORING, and most of it is me going "oooh a troll druid" and "man this ret pally is awwwful" and "man, so, this is really fucking boring. This is my rotation... learn it. Or something. man this is boring." I would've been alt-tabbing except I needed to show my screen. Also, the audio de-synced so I'll add in audio later.Point is, heroics are facerollable. Not for everyone--fresh 80s with no epix yet, for example, but:I) those are few & far betweenII) it won't matter in 2 weeksIII) I'm not gonna make videos about irrelevant content that will only become less relevant in 2 weeksIV) honestly, even if you're badly geared and you enter a random, you're gonna be with overgeared people. I figure >95% of playing level 80s (or mains or whatever) overgear instances, and probably >85% of level 80s significantly outgear them. For example, I've been in a group where all 5 people were in a dps spec and we just killed stuff cause it died fast and nobody needed heals. Point is, if 1/20 people are at "heroic-level" gear, ilevel200 blues, then the odds of two of those people in a dungeon finder is... 1/400. 3 of them is 1/8000. four of them is what, 1/160,000? Which is entirely POSSIBLE seeing as wow has 13,000,000 active accounts, practically all of them with more than one character, a solid fraction with more than one level 80. I'm just saying that when WotLK landed, everyone was heroic geared, and now I can 2 man every heroic except the ICC ones, which can probably be 2-manned by "light of dawn"-types, or at most 3-manned.

So, what you should get out of that is "No tanking vids from Hyperiom". There might be other videos (my UI, for example. Dailies. Changes to shit. Soloing instances) but no 'this is how to (do X in PvE)" because it's all gonna be completely useless.

11.14.2010

On balance, or gear levels, or some crazy shit. I dunno. I'm just going to copy-paste it because maybe tomorrow or the day after I'll write a clarified opinion on what you're about to see. It will be disjointed, it does sprawl tangentially over the place, but hey--that's what conversation does.

This is a forum topic. It's not as clear-cut as you might like, cause each post is at minimum a few sentences, and each post covers a couple of related subtopics. I'm going to try and edit it to clean it up and make it slightly more readable, but before I do that, let me tell you that I dunno how to set Blogspot/Blogger so it only shows the first few paragraphs and then has a 'jump', as it's called. I don't know why that isn't a super-easy to find setting, but a quick once-over turned up nothing (I haven't googled the solution, yet)--so be warned: this post is topping 4000 words.

On WoW Gearing & End-Game Philosophy

Hyperiom:I think the gear differences between 3.0 and 4.0 are out of control. ilevel 200 to 280 is an extraordinary range. I remember WORKING at the Loken achievement (kill him in less than 2 minutes, I believe) and we popped bloodlust and everything.
Today I got Halls of Lightning for a random heroic, and there was an unholy dk and a resto druid who were in the same guild.
Shit was dying really fast, and I thought "hunh they must've nerfed HoL"... and then I realize that the DK isn't doing 1000dps, but 10,000 dps. I realize those swirls around him are no random buff, and that axe is not merely shiny, but the motherfucker has a shadowmourne.

Ten minutes after the first pull of the instance, we're standing in front of the last boss. About twenty seconds ago I realized that the healer is not just really fucking good, that shiny thing around me is actually the proc from Val'Anyr (or whatever it's called). There are two legendary items in this heroic.
We killed loken in eighteen seconds. Just a kill, nothing fancy, no strategy, no popping-all-cooldowns-raaargh, just a procedural kill.
In eighteen seconds. He has 512,278 hp. that's 28,460 single-target dps from the 5 members of the group. Me hitting maaybe 3k, single target, the healer busy healing. 25k in a heroic from 3 people.
I remember a time when I was in heroic nexus and I told someone "dude I'm with these ret pallies and they're really good! This one's doing 2.2k!"
That's absurd. That's how trivialized the content has gotten. Heroic achievements don't really mean anything. Ionar only disperses once, and we just stood there.
Later, I researched these guys, and realized that the resto druid that healed me with the ulduar legendary ISN'T EVEN THE GUY'S MAIN.
Iza:
I mean, that's the problem with a game that, in order to hold onto it's player base, simply keeps adding end game content.

Also, it sounds like you were with players that new what they were doing (if their guilds gave them legendaries they likely weren't scrubs), and that quality of player was doing 3k dps when the content was relevant anyway, and closer to 5k once they had Naxx/Maly/OS gear (our very first Naxx 10 I was 3rd on dps at 3.1k on patch, and I had exactly 2 pieces of level 80 gear on)

Hyperiom:
My point is that four patches shouldn't be tripling people's damage and hp and healing. Wrath was a special case, because for each instance they added not-one-but-two tiers every time. Naxx-10 was 200, 25 was 213, and to make ulduar better it was what, 219/226 + 232 for hardmodes, so ToC-10 had to be 232, toc-25 245, and then their heroics had to be a tier or half a tier higher, and then ICC had to start out at 251 and go all the way up to 277 (with H-LK being 284, as well as H-25 Halion).

Whereas it was ilevel 115 for kara, 125 for gruul/mag, 128-138 for SSC and TK (and I think some 141s from Vashj and Kael), tier 6 was 151, and SWP was 154-164.
One thing they did in BC that they didn't do much in wotlk was give harder bosses better items. In wotlk, the last boss is a tier higher, but there was a greater variance in BC. The ranges within the instances were bigger so maybe they didn't have to make the differences between the tiers so big. Also there were a few places for t4, two for t5 and t6 respectively, and then... well, nobody got into sunwell anyways.

In burning crusade, the difference between a guy with heroics/kara gear, some blues (12k or so) and a guy in full sunwell gear (20k?) was big. The difference between heroic gearing at wotlk (with maybe 20k?) and Light-of-Dawn level (60k) is much vaster, both in numbers and proportion. Shit's too much, dawg. I think blizzard pushed it too far.

Mike:H MgT was released with Sunwell and was much harder, though still trivial in Sunwell gear. You can't compare that to HoL. Compare it to HoR, which is hard, though not in full ICC H gear. Also 284/200 = 142%. 164/115 = 142.6%. Our first Naxx run our tank had 29k HP. Now our tank has 70k (241% increase). Our first Kara run our tank had 11k hp. In Sunwell gear it was (I think) 26 (It was a few k over 23 I know because when we went back for Kael we didn't have to use CDs for pyro anymore and that hit for 23k) (239% increase). In kara gear a good dps would do 800, maybe 900 dps (375% increase). In sunwell gear it was 3k. In naxx gear 5k was around the top, in ICC it's 30k, -30% = 23k without the ICC buff (460% increase).

So only dps is really ahead of TBC, and not by terribly much (and part of that is because the fights are shorter than they were in Naxx when your raid is doing record breaking dps, so CDs are up for a bigger percentage of the fight)

Content released 2 years ago is never going to be challenging in the least if you have up to date gear. Even MgT was completely trivialized if you had one Sunwell quality DPS. And in a group that had 2 legendaries? Nothing would even cause us to blink. Gear obtained from content MUCH harder than what you are doing makes the easy content easier.

Hyperiom:
...and you don't find this ridiculous at all? It stands anyways. I feel like blizzard goes "Oh fuck we have to make an expansion NOW, which radically changes everything, cause otherwise the entire game breaks down."

I dunno, I guess that's just part of my general sentiment that skill should matter more than gear, and that sarth+3 (or, say, yogg+1) should be facerollable just cause of gear level.

Luc:
Hah. Well wait till you get to t11 at 85. The ratings conversion has been so brutal that you will barely do better DPS than you did at 80.
Starting t11, average caster crit % is 20%, haste 8%.
Melee, plate's sitting at 5% from gear, 10% haste average.
The issue with wotlk is that stacking high haste and crit was too easy. People were sitting at 40-50% crit self buffed or more, and likely 30% haste. That just lends itself to extremely high damage inflation in the way those ratings interplay with talents etc.
Highest crit at 85 with a regular rotational nuke is on my Moonkin's Starsurge at 80k with all the planets aligned in PvE. 15 sec cd spell.
What they need to do is make sure that as they release newer content that they reevaluate gating content via stats and doing something else instead to gate it.

Hyperiom:@mike-: In a different group, with slightly less gear around (still ICC-25, maybe some heroic stuff, no legendaries) I did Pit of Saron. No eyelashes were batted, even as I, the tank, was making increasingly reckless pulls to test the limits of the group. I dunno, man. I just think it's weird that they let gear get so out out control that the very mechanics of boss fights; the PvE part of the game, falls apart at every level except the top. You don't build a building's foundation out of chalk and the roof out of iron. "What they need to do is make sure that as they release newer content that they reevaluate gating content via stats and doing something else instead to gate it."Which is currently exemplified by "running icc-25 gs 5400 minimum!"I mean, I get that big numbers = progression, but I think that it's a good step to reduce efforts at stacking. In Ulduar, fury warriors got so many bonuses from an extra 2h, and ArP was just beginning to be really fucking good, Blizzard said "eh, fuck it, we'll just cut their total damage by 10%"... which actually meant a lot more than 10% because that meant less rage, meant less special attacks (which were hitting for less anyways), and it was a clusterfuck.That was eventually balanced... or it would've been, until warriors reached the passive ArP cap, which meant yet again, the numbers went totally insane. Blizzard needs to either hire some of the people at EJ, or figure it out themselves: powergamers, who are doing the content to begin with, are going to figure out all the weird intricacies. It's fine for blizzard to figure out an ideal formula and such for creating X stat, but they have to think to the next step (I was just on EJ looking at fury warriors--take 3/3 incite until you have 47.16% crit. I'll be surprised if that was common knowledge at Blizzard), because that's where all the shit comes into effect.
Straight-up increasing the ratios is well and good, but I think they need a way to make balance a more desirable trait. Even now, the paradigm is going to be "stack this stat till it hits Y, then stack this one till it hits Z; take this talent until variable A = XX%..." I mean, self-scaling stats like ArP were proved to not work well (because of the aforementioned gear-breaking-down-the-mechanics-of-the-game thing) so if they made things work better relative to each other (I mean yes, each point of haste makes each point of crit marginally better (or maybe it's the other way around) but it's far too marginal)... I suppose mastery is one way to address it, but it's not quite enough. With protection warriors it makes you more likely to block and critical block, but it doesn't change the value of those (30/60%). If they kept SBV, in some altered form, then each point of shield block value would make each point of mastery better. Or something

Ward:It's always going to be like that unless every stat has exactly the same benefit for everyone. And I mean exactly, to the point where you can just gem at random and be no better off than any amount of planning. That would be a terrible state for the game to end up in.We're also playing with Cata talents now without the Cata hike in combat rating ratios.Every period of the game has had this level of increase in power. At this point it's simply necessary to feel like you're making constant progress. If the game had been different from release, say, had an exact maximum for character power, and you had other incentives to continue playing, then we wouldn't be in this model now. But it wasn't, and now we are. There's nothing inherently wrong with the model, these are things we've been doing for 2 years and the vast majority of them weren't even difficult in the first place.Hyperiom:I'm sure something can be reached where it's better to have 15% crit and 15% haste over 30% crit. That's the problem.

Yeah, every jump has been massive. Yeah, I think that's ridonkulous. And yes, the patch-that-preludes-the-expansion is notorious, but the gear example is different from the talent stuff. If you had a Shadowmourne in May you'd be doing absurd dps (and don't even get me started on fury warriors with SM/Glorenzeg. It's gone to plaid.)

I just feel like if they'd done more, smaller patches and smaller jumps between levels of gear. I realize that's difficult. But if there were 2 patches for every one of these (and lets say they gated naxx and ulduar and toc as much as they did icc, so that alleviates some of the "they'd need way more instances and that's hard" arguments), then I think this 'current' patch, which would be 3.6, never should've happened. I feel like they should've stopped at 3.5...

or maybe not do the weird "we're making you play expansion characters without expansion content" thing to such an excessive degree. Maybe that's a solution.

Mike:Does it bother you that you can one shot hogger too? Skill ought to mean more than gear right? I shouldn't be able to faceroll the Scarlet Monestery or Scholomance!

Why does it matter that old content is easy? I really don't find that ridiculous in the least. There's a 12 boss instance with 2 difficulty levels, and another 4 boss instance there waiting for you to play. If you want to talk about whether H ICC or H Halion is easy/hard, I'm happy to discuss that, but complaining that heroic content is easy when you have 2 people with legendaries (which, aside from the gear implications, suggests they are also very skilled players, guilds don't give legendaries to people who are bad.. usually)... you're pretty much complaining that a game is too easy when you play it on baby mode... with pros helping you through it.

Part of the reward of beating harder content is it makes earlier content easier. It's been the same in pretty much every game ever. If you don't like that, there are some games out there that try to avoid it, I think EVE is an example. But from D&D to FF1 to Diablo to everything after that, you kill hard guys, they give you better stuff to kill harder guys, and everything before it gets easier.

By the way, Sarth+3 was zerg'd back when it was current (10 man at least), and people got all those heroic achievements within a week or two of release. Maybe you found them difficult, but your guys with shadowmourne and valynar probably didn't.

Phil:Agreed - gear scaling was/is a huge issue. I think when Heroics and Naxx were the top teir of content people were clocking in at 2k on average. Now its 10k+. I think through all of BC going from kara to sunwell gear about doubled your dps. There was still a sense of progression without things becoming absurd. But, hey, nostalgia's awesome.Sad truth is that you can [faceroll SM and Scholomance], atm, at their intended levels, without heirlooms and maybe 50% blue/50% green gear. 4.0 upset a lot of lowbie stuff - SM Gy was like... 4 pulls total at level 30. At level 51 I literally breezed through the BRD Torch Room. Having a mage in the party is even better -- they can one-shot entire packs in that room.

Mike:That's just patently untrue. 2k was piss poor dps in Naxx. The bare minimum to beat Patch was 2.1k average, and most guilds killed him on night 1, before they had any serious level 80 gear. Before ulduar came out people were over 5k. In TBC heroic gear, 600-700 dps was impressive, in full Kara gear you might push 900. In sunwell people broke 3k, which is 5 times the heroic gear level. (To give an idea comparable to Patchwerk, Curator was a pretty tough gear check and required ~485 dps average and I'm not even counting the double damage during evocate which lowers that even more... oh and by the way, in sunwell gear you killed him before he evocated. Brutallus on the other hand required 2k - 2.2k depending on how many healers you used)

Nostalgia is awesome, it can make you believe anything you want to.

Hyperiom:
[In response to "then you shouldn't be 1-shotting SM!" comment by Mike]No. There's a difference between 'old content' like "content that's actually 50 levels below you" and "content that is technically at your level, but effectively 50 levels below you"My general complaint isn't "heroic content is easy when you're with a badass group"; that was just an example to illustrate how generally easy it is. If I'm doing Heroic UP, and everyone but me in the group still rolls on some of the blues cause they're brand spankin' new 80s, the content is still trivial. Fresh 80s can instantly buy badge gear >50 ilevels more than what was even accessible.Obviously it's fine that I can one-shot hogger cause I'm in badass gear and I'm eight times his level. But when scholomance is trivial to people who are level 57 or so, there's a problem, cause it's supposed to be difficult for that tier. It ain't anymore, cause level 58s have gear that's better than naxx-40.

As far as zerging sarth within weeks, I don't know how true that is. I'm pretty sure the world first of sarth10+3 wasn't until december at least. I know that Ensidia did naxx and maly and sarth+0 within the first two days, but even 10+3d was done in days, it was by not just server-best guilds, but guilds who have been THE best guilds for years. Ensidia, as a two guild collective, got the world first for c'thun, Kel'thuzad-40, and >90% of bosses in BC. They don't need to zerg sarth cause they have the coordination of a hivemind, and being such a ridiculous outlier, they're not good to point and say 'they did it'.HOWEVER, seeing as we're talking about sarth:I remember when a pally got the world first solo of onyxia. He was 80, onyxia was a level 60 raid boss. Later, she was killable by druids and hunters and other classes. I also remember when 3.0 came out and some people 3-manned some bosses in karazhan (netherspite was the hardest if you had few people.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epZB7alg4TkIn that video, you have a DK soloing Sarth-10. This is unprecedented; to my knowledge there was a video of an spriest soloing scholomance, but no paladins soloing UBRS or L70 druids soloing kara.

Mike:Ok, go get a group where everyone is in blues and do H UP. It's possible of course, but you'll find it's not as easy as you think it is. If you outgear the instance, yeah it's easier. That doesn't bother me in the least. In fact, that's what keep people playing the damn game. But you haven't given a good example of that actually happening, since the type of player who gets a legendary is the type of player for which this content was trivial in blues.

If your complaint is that you get to skip all this content and go right into ICC, that's fine, but you haven't made that complaint. If your complaint is that Heroics are too easy, that's nothing new, it doesn't bother me in the least, and it's actually a big reason people keep playing. You work hard to get something and it makes stuff that used to be challenging easier.

Ward:Also, Onyxa was 3 manned at 60, Loatheb was 5 manned (admittedly under bizzare circumstances) at 60. Gruul and Illidan were 5 manned at 70. A super-dodge-bear soloing Kara at 70 would not have been surprising, but I do not recall if it actually happened.

Mike:Rogues definitely solo'd scholo, and mages solo'd BRD at 60.

But the reason we're seeing raid bosses being solo'd now is that WotLK brought with it HEAPS of self healing, something that wasn't around before, and it let tanks do decent dps. Those two make much bigger differences than gear.
Hyperiom:Yeah, but it's shockingly easy to outgear instances now. You get justice points using the random dungeon finder even when you aren't 80, so you can't actually use them, until you hit 80 and can buy 3 or 4 pieces of ilevel 251 or 264 gear. There are no groups where you do H UP and nobody has epics. My legendary thing was just a general anecdote. In general, everyone who's been 80 for a day or two is better geared than I was at 80. Hell, anyone with some knowledge is better geared than anyone in full naxx-gear.Not only does the insane gear gap make the content easier than ever, it's easier than ever to get to that gear level.

At 70, I soloed instances. At 80, I've soloed instances. That's not the same as soloing a raid. DKs, even when they were super overpowered, weren't soloing raids. I'd say that's proof that gear matters quite a bit.

Edit: actually the only time I've heard of a raid boss being soloed was when a rogue stacked up enough dodge that Gruul couldn't hit him, so that definitely ties into this whole idea of "stack X stat until you've broken the game"--which I think is unequivocally a problem; any character that's literally unhittable by a raid boss is indeed breaking the game, cause that's never intended.Which also ties into that idea of "blizzard needs to think like players"

Ward:Tripling power over 2 years is an average 4.7% gain in strength per month. That's pretty hard to call excessive. The majority of guilds do not slam through the heroic mode of a raid in a month (with the accompanying spike in power following a patch) and have actually a rate of progress quite close to or even lower than this ~5% per month value. It's only when you compare it in a 2 year lapse that this exponential growth seems excessive.

Hyperiom:No no no. 4.7% a month is a handy statistic, but totally irrelevant because it's not a 5%-increase patch every month. We're at 3.3 (or were, before 4.0) Three major patches over 2 years = 8 months. That's, according to your average, (4.7 x 8 ) = 37.6% increase each patch? But not exactly that; I think it's higher. I mean, you could do it like (5000dps x (1.4)3), but that's not perfectly correct either. I'm fine with reading EJ formulas but I could never derive them myself.The drasticicity of the increases are part of the problem, cause you go from 79 (probably a bit better than I was at 79--I didn't have epics except maybe one or two from kara, and I think that's a fairly solid baseline) to 80 (me: a crafted epic or two, some dungeon blues, a gearscore of maybe 3k. On the other hand, contemporary fresh 80s: easily can hit a gearscore of what, 5000?)'tis a vast gulf, and it kinda screws up the game. Which is why they have to go to cataclysm, and put in new ratings and a huge chunk of new content, cause if they went all the way to say, 3.5 and had badge gear that was ilevel 297 or 310... phew.

Ward:You also don't suddenly leap up 50% when a patch is released. Most guilds take most of the time between patches to fully access all of the heroic rewards - if not longer. That's a slow gradual increase in the overall playerbase's power. It's a discrete increase for individual players, but for incremental gearing - people who were already playing the previous patch and are not fresh 80s - these upgrades are not massive, and actually tend to be just about right for feeling a slight increase in strength without spiraling out of control in the long run.

It's also not 4.7*8 over 8 months, it's 1.047^8, or 1.4422, and then 1.4422^3 = 3.

This effect was exaggerated by LK's easier 5 man heroics, which are now simply laughable.Hyperiom:Alright, my representation of your math was off, but that just serves to underline my point. a 44.2% increase in available power (or however we want to term it; available item-levelage, available gear-power, i dunno) every patch.However, it's still not as gradual as you're saying. A few months before the next major patch hits, plenty of people stop playing. I remember six weeks before ulduar hit, 15 of our 25-man group was logging in maybe once a week to say "hey has the patch hit, hey lets run goddamn naxx AGAIN." Same thing's happening now (hell, I started playing again cause cataclysm is happening soon). I don't wanna make judgments on time, but it's definitely not the full eight months before the playerbase has ramped up in power--it's like a series of curves, not linear. The gear levels and damage level go up pretty sharply every patch, and then even out to a nice +44.2% or whatever we decided on.

11.12.2010

But I'm back. Hyperiom, the tank, is back. Sicarian, the death knight tank, is back. Other characters and shit--they're all back.

I stopped playing in February cause I was sick and tired of the game, as I hinted in my post, nine months ago. However, I'm back in the swing, I'm ready for Cataclysm, and I've stopped giving a shit as to the G-rated slant I was taking. Everyone does that; I'll be different. Fuck a kid-friendly rating, this game is rated T-for-Teen, and if you're a teen, you probably talk dirtier than I do.

SO WHAT'S UP IN MY WORLD?My server seems to have had some mass emigration. What is usually a 'low population server' is now essentially a 'ghost town server'--it could be the spam filter on trade chat, or it could be that there's only about 40 people in Dalaran at a given time (whereas there's hundreds on Kil'Jaeden). I've been going to school, so I'm getting some weird playing hours, but overall I have more free time, which is fantastic.

I like the new badge/point system, because getting about a hundred points per run is better than all that other shit of getting 2 badges from one instance, 5 badges from another. I don't even know if it SHOULD be even like that, and I do realize that each boss is 16, +23 from the completion, but I swear to god I'm getting almost exactly 100 justice points every single run. Which is nice.

Tanking's changed. I was looking at the blog and I saw I had a whole video that I was gonna do, and I read my prepared script and thought "fuck, man. I can't do this anymore. Not since damage shield is gone and vigilance is gone and AoE tanking is utterly different/worse than before." I saw that I had a planned guide to defensive stats, to compliment my threat guide (which is still fairly valid; gem colors have changed, though), but that doesn't work.

I'll talk to you about Mastery and other stats now:

-From my own experience, as well as what I've gleaned from EJ and Tankspot, you want to reforge all your Dodge into Mastery, as a warrior tank. Parry and Dodge are finally equal, and Parry gives you the "Hold the Line" buff, which is good. You'll still have plenty of dodge (reforging only switches over about 40% of your stats), but now you'll block for a lot more. I think warriors are primed to out-tank paladins again, which is great. I think it was awful from a design perspective to say "Warriors are too popular, let's nerf them to the ground so nobody wants to play them" instead of equalizing classes.

-Stamina is still the most important stat in Wrath, simply because magical damage is STILL the Big Thing. In Cataclysm, we're gonna see more physical damage--damage we can mitigate with our awesome blocking and dodging and parrying--but right now we still see some really intense blasts of magic, which can't be stopped unless you've got hit points out the ass.

-Speaking of hitpoints out the ass, over the last 9 months of me leaving, I went from approximately 35k hitpoints unbuffed to 45k. I dunno what changed, or maybe I really had that much back then, but I take hits a lot better. It's great.

-I'm getting some good badge gear, the ilevel 264 stuff, some crafted pieces, and some tier gear. Then, I'll probably get accepted into this raiding guild I want to be a part of. Lotta great raiders in there, and I want to do 10-man content in cataclysm. I think the idea of "Hardcore 10-man" is interesting, because it's so much easier than a 25-man. I'm seeing guilds talk about having 2 groups of 10-mans, which (to me) makes more sense than one giant 25-man group.This is especially amusing to me, because I remember in 2007, a lot of guilds were going from 40-man to 2 groups of 25. That was ALMOST popular, except Karazhan, the first raid in BC, was 10 man, and nobody wanted to deal with 5 kara groups in one guild. Thus, that all got weeded out and trickled down and the modus operandi became "a single 25-man group." VERY shrewd, VERY clever on Blizzard's part (and I'm absolutely sure it was intentional.)

I'll talk more later about design philosophy, but right now I'm trying to get loremaster of outland. Netherstorm's gonna be a bitch, cause at level 70 I did a ton of SMV quests. At the moment, I need about 20 in hellfire, 10 in terrokar, and 70 in netherstorm.

1.20.2010

So recently I acquired both an Obsidian Edged Blade (ilevel 232 from Onyxia) and a Tyrannical Beheader (from Heroic Pit of Saron). I went fury.

SHIT'S FUN, YO.

I mean, my gear is terrible. I only pull like, 2.5k dps in a 25-man sartharion raid. Now, that's alright, because I wasn't the lowest dps. Also, it's my first time with the spec, the rotation, and I'm in mostly ilevel 213-226 gear (and a lot of the stuff is pvp). Honestly, this is inspiring me to play the game.

You see, I had an issue where I would log on, do the heroic daily (and the weekly if it was a tuesday), get my frost badges, and dick around for an hour or two talking on trade chat and making small sums of money. I had no need to run heroics for triumph badges--now, I do, because I can just get a ton of triumph badges for fury spec, and I think i'm going to have fun doing it--DPS is always in demand, and I'm a competent player.

Tips for those going fury:-Watch your hit. Higher is better.-the rotation is WW-BT-GCD (free slam if possible)-WAIT FOR 1 SECOND-BT-WAIT FOR 1 SECOND-WW.-those wait times are critical. if you mess up those 2 points, shit goes out of wack. which is bad. use that second to check your buffs, check where you're at, and reposition.-as a tank, I often find myself chaining cooldowns--Shield block, THEN dodge trinket, THEN shield wall, THEN shield block, THEN last stand, THEN all the healing stuff I have, THEN shield block... don't do this as dps. The returns on damage are far better if you stack all your shit together.IE if bloodlust pops, use your trinket! if your "chance on hit" trinket pops, use your "Use: xxx" trinket!

Warriors, as a class, scale Too Well with gear. A medium-to-well-geared warrior will do only average dps. A warrior with full Best in Slot gear will annihilate meters. Blizzard has complained about this, and the problem is compounded with the extra stats that a 2-hander gives fury.

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About Me

Level 80 Undead Protection Warrior, kicking ass and taking names since Christmas 2004. I'm the head writer for World Of Tankcraft, and I have created this persona and this account for the express purpose of doing so. A friend of mine, Midnight, is technically another writer but he doesn't do much. He plays very little WoW and likes graphic design and blogging. He's pretty much my editor, but he's a pretty cool guy.